Marketing and the church: Should god be sold or found?

Abstract

Abstract Recent years have seen an expansion of marketing in social causes and not‐for‐profit activities; there continues to he considerable debate about the extent to which this simply reflects a pragmatic application of established marketing techniques or whether it truly reflects efforts to be genuinely market orientated. Indeed some may argue that the nature of social cause marketing is such that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be customer‐driven. The marketing of the Church is one manifestation of social cause marketing where marketing programmes are calculated to influence the acceptability of social ideas. The paper seeks to examine whether the marketing techniques and approaches used in relation to the Church are really marketing or just a form of selling. It is argued that the core product of the Church, salvation, is not really subject to modification in response to customer needs and thus that questions may arise about the possibility of genuinely marketing the Church. However, where there is a willingness to develop and modify the expected and augmented products in response to the changing needs and expectations of a ‘marketplace’, arguably there is evidence of marketing, not just selling.

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